Leonard points out that even huge islands, such as the Hawaiian island chain, create effects like eddies in the ocean. Not understanding those factors and conditions—tides, swell direction, wind direction, eddies, currents, wave height, steepness of the wave face, ocean depth (and hence, wave energy)—can hurt as much as help a paddler.
He uses the example of kayakers looking to cross a channel and make it to the beach to illustrate his point. “A lot of people are going to say, I don’t want to be in the tidal rip. They’re going to wait for slack water and mosey across,” Leonard explains. “If you’re a competent surfer, you’re not going to be afraid of the tidal rip in the middle of a channel. I’m looking for peak tides when I’ve got the biggest waves and the fastest water to get me where I need to go. And well, I’m going to beat those other people to the beach by a long shot.”
In simpler terms, it comes down to working hand in hand with Mother Nature, rather than against her. And that’s precisely how Leonard blazed across the Inuit Passage in record time—he wanted “the ice gone and big winds.” Knowing that Arctic winds prevail out of the northwest, he traveled east. With the wind on his shoulder, he made incredible time, “and those were happy times,” he says. “A little bit of planning and research can really go a long way. You’re not going to beat Mother Nature, and there are plenty of people, especially here in the Arctic, who didn’t live to tell their story because of that.”
All in all, such synergy with Mother Nature and the techniques as a whole, are skills that Leonard, a kass’aq, or “white man” in Yup’ik, borrows from the early Alaskan cultures, and appropriately underscore the immense contributions of native paddlers to present-day kayaking. As performance kayaking ushers in the future of the sport with cutting-edge designs and techniques, ironically, it moves closer and closer to kayaking’s heritage.
From Leonard’s perspective, today’s paddlers are “still playing catch-up” with the sport’s native forefathers. “Traditional paddlers lived on the ocean in their kayaks,” he notes. “There’s no way to equate their experience to that of paddlers today. From that standpoint, we’re all recreational boaters.”
That’s not to diminish the skill and drive of today’s performance kayakers. Leonard, for his part, has his sights set on a host of notable projects for the coming years. The consummate multitasker (he maintains a dizzying array of Internet blogs on all things kayaking-related) is intent on perfecting a performance-expedition touring ski. He tries to spend as much time as possible on what he calls “Alaskan expedition surf surfaris”—paddling hybrid sit-on-tops, many of which are the creation of Hawaiian kayak designer Hunt Johnson, to remote breaks along Alaska’s 35,000 miles of coastline and surfing like a bandit. He spends much time, too, giving back to the native communities of the Y-K Delta through the beloved sport they taught him: kayaking; something he wishes the greater kayak community would do as a whole.
In all, it’s an ambitious ticket, but one that Leonard, among all people, just might be capable of pulling off. “If you’re not unsuccessful—if you’re not failing—you’re not really trying to do anything,” he concludes. “I’m just trying to stay on the water. There are 10 mountains on my list, and if I climb half of them, I’m doing pretty well.”

Adventure writer Peter Bronski (www.peterbronski.com) profiled New York City’s Eric Stiller for Sea Kayaker’s February 2005 issue.